Customizing the TOC Icons used in HTML

There are 5 small predefined images in your Plain HTML folder that control the icons that appear inside your HTML TOC:

• plus.gif
• minus.gif
• obook.gif
• cbook.gif, and
• topic.gif

The obook (open book) and cbook (closed book) images appear when a topic has descendents, and are used to represent the state of the branch - an open book for expanded, and a closed book for collapsed. The plus and minus images are also used to represent this, and when clicked will expand or collapse the branch accordingly.

The Publisher searches for these images in the Plain HTML folder relative to the Templates location defined in Author-it under Tools > Options > File Locations. You can easily replace these images with your own (provided you retain the same filenames) to change the look and feel of your TOC.

Tip: To change the images for only certain Books (and not others) create the images in an alternative folder, and define these as Additional Files under the HTML properties of the Book. They are then copied to the Publishing folder, overwriting those the Publisher uses from the Plain HTML folder.

Let's look at the Author-it Knowledge Center. We've removed the open and closed book. Or have we...? We could simply delete the open and closed book images from our Plain HTML folder, but as Author-it looks for these at publishing time it would report that it can't find them. Furthermore, we would end up with broken images in the final published output. Not very professional! Instead, we have created two new tiny transparent images and named these obook.gif and cbook.gif replacing the default open and closed books.